Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 280, which has core clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 280		7961 points
Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 2761 (53%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		183 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7850		171 Sol/s
	Difference: 12 (7%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon R9 280		22 Mh/s
Radeon HD 7850		13 Mh/s
	Difference: 9 (69%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7850 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be a lot (about 90%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49456 (90%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2336 (8%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.